or you could say we are for the most part only taking in a certain segment of the population from these countries. Educated and already middle class or higher. You are not comparing apples to apples.
One need not suppose anything.
Look who has a majority of the H1-B visas or who comes here for higher education.
Those who are not educated from East Asia can't easily come to the US illegally as those who can cross overland (Mexico and central America) can. Poor Chinese villagers are not boating to America.
How is that significantly different from Western Europe? Or the Middle East? Or Sub-Saharan Africa? Are the poorest of the poor there making it here? Why are East Asians over-represented in higher education or H1-Bs compared to other places?
First, much of East Asia has extremely demanding placement tests for elite high schools (and sometimes lower schools). You might reasonably say that we're only taking students from good high schools around the world, but that's a comment about school quality, not students. As people often point out, Harvard dropouts are almost as successful as Harvard grads - merely getting in represents a powerful filter. So it's plausible that we're taking rich/educated elites worldwide, but in East Asia we've got a talent/skill filter comparable to college admissions being applied in advance.
Second, your point: there's a non-trivial penalty for being a Chinese applicant to a US college, and it's not particularly obvious what impact that has. I suppose it could be that the harsher requirements for acceptance are driving the difference, and we don't have any real evidence on how responsive outcomes are to changing that restriction. (Is there a good breakdown of outcomes for a given group by visa type? That might show whether nation-specific admission rules on some visa types are changing outcomes.)
(The third thought, of course, is "it's a huge multifactorial mess and there's probably not enough data to trust any conclusion we come to".)
First: Great, so their culture is what is causing them to outperform us in virtually every positive metric. That certainly doesn't make me want to be less welcoming to them.
Second: The non-trivial penalty came AFTER Chinese people became over-represented.
It's not as complicated as you're trying to make it out to be. Something is causing East Asians to outperform us in basically every positive trait. They have higher IQs, higher incomes, lower criminality rates, lower poverty rates, etc. And these stats hold true even generations after immigration. Maybe it feels complicated because you're concerned about the root cause analysis. I'm not. They're doing great, we should want great people here.
I wasn't the same person you were replying to upthread, and I'm certainly not arguing against offering more visas. I just thought your "given that we're taking elites, what's different?" question was interesting, and wanted to raise a possible answer.
(I agree that if the penalty came after better outcomes, it's not a relevant factor. I wasn't familiar enough with which restrictions were in place when to say.)
But yes: the complicated part is root causes, and that's not relevant to whether we should expand our visa/citizenship program; we certainly should. If someone in the thread disagrees with you there, it's not me.
It's almost certainly IQ. IQ also correlates to all those other positive traits. East Asians have higher average IQs than most other people, particularly spacial reasoning and math which explains their over-representation in engineering. Conversely Ashkenazi Jews have higher than average verbal IQs which explains why they appear over represented in media. But that doesn't get us very far because it just gets us back to East Asians outperforming us on IQ tests created by mostly white people and is supposedly culturally biased to have white people outperform. There's something definitely going on here. Maybe it's genetics, maybe it's diet, maybe it's culture. Possibly a combination. It's not really helpful to try to have a discussion on IQ, so I just focus on the positive traits that are derived from IQ. It tends to trigger people less and raw IQ isn't actually important to me compared to things like criminality and economic output.
